Our look at the most popular news stories we covered in 2014 kicks off two weeks of year-in-review lists.

Marketing Land’s third full calendar year of publishing is almost over, and it was a fascinating year of covering the digital marketing industry. As we get set to forge ahead into a new year, let’s first take a look back at the news and events that shaped the industry in 2014.

Starting today and continuing through the end of next week, the editorial team that brings you daily news and features on Marketing Land and Search Engine Land will be looking back at the most popular content we published during these past 12 months. This’ll include our most popular columns (overall, and broken down by topic) and our most shared stories on the main social networks.

But it starts today with a look back at the most popular news items of 2014.

Marketing Land’s Most Popular News Stories Of 2014

This list is based on pageviews, and includes news stories published through December 18th.

Greg Finn, March 7: “The most noticeable element missing in the new layout is the beautiful News Feed re-imagined concept that was touted last year. The custom feeds would make the content feel more modern and newspaper-y. It was a bold, out-of-the-box look. A look that didn’t resonate with the users however.”

Danny Sullivan, March 3: “Samsung’s a big sponsor of the Oscars, to the degree that it even had this year’s host Ellen DeGeneres doing a record-breaking star-studded selfie with a Galaxy phone. But behind the scenes, there’s an iPhone being used.”

Danny Sullivan, June 6: “In 2012, after a fake CIA account turned up on Twitter, the CIA told the Washington Post that for the time being, it prefered to keep its thoughts to itself rather than tweet. Said a spokesperson then:

“We prefer to keep our daily musings to ourselves. Perhaps someday you’ll be able to read official Tweets from Langley, but until then, people can do the old-fashioned thing and check out our Web page.”

Martin Beck, March 31: “However inexact, displaying the metric is clearly part of an effort to emphasize activity on the network, very similar to Twitter’s experimenting with displaying views on individual tweets.”

Amy Gesenhues, January 29: “As the brand’s social media manager, Martin has grown Arby’s social media presence to 2.5 million Facebook fans and over 217,000 Twitter followers. Arby’s is now also active on Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Linkedin and YouTube.

“Our CMO has created an environment for our team to have freedom and flexibility,” said Martin, “I’m not going to put the brand in jeopardy. If I do think it’s controversial, I run it up the flagpole.” He claims the free range he has gained comes from building trust with his supervisors over time.”

Danny Sullivan, April 24: “Google may have built a solid second-place rival to Facebook in terms of being a full-featured social network, but that’s like Bing being solid search challenger to Google. It doesn’t matter. People who are happy with Google don’t shift to Bing; people who are happy with Facebook — and over a billion seem to be — don’t shift to Google+.”

Danny Sullivan, July 11: “The reality is that Twitter has never shown everything a brand (or anyone on Twitter) tweets to all a brand’s followers. Unlike Facebook, that’s not because Twitter is trying to filter tweets in order to somehow show what it considers the “best” stuff. Rather, it’s a consequence that it’s never the case that all of a brand’s followers will be on Twitter at the same time, all seeing each tweet that goes out.”

Ginny Marvin, January 16: “By allowing publishers to link their WordPress sites to their AdSense accounts, the plugin is designed to make getting ads up and running easier and eliminate the need for manual HTML modifications.”

Martin Beck, March 10: “The change appears to be the final pullback from the dual-column Timeline-style design, announced by Mark Zuckerberg with great fanfare in 2011 and resisted by many Facebook users for months — in some cases years — afterward. Last March, Facebook adjusted the look of user Timelines to be similar to News Feeds. Now pages will get the same treatment.”

Danny Sullivan, July 2: “This latest chapter with removals is showing how messy and confusing this whole process is, one that wasn’t developed by any organized attempt to figure out pros, cons and implementation issues but instead by flat decree by the EU Court Of Justice.”

Talk about variety, right? Facebook layout changes, a Google AdSense plugin, Grammys/Oscars social activity and “Right To Be Forgotten” affecting search results in Europe … that’s a good snapshot of the wide variety of marketing-related content we cover here on Marketing Land.

About The Author

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.